Saturday, April 16, 2011

NYT on NYU-Abu Dhabi

The New York Times has an article today on New York University in Abu Dhabi. Some extracts:

Many American colleges and universities have created outposts around the world. But N.Y.U. is the first to open a liberal arts college intending to roughly reproduce the experience students get in Washington Square. It aims to have 2,200 undergraduates within the next 10 years, part of a plan by New York University’s president, John Sexton, to create a worldwide network with N.Y.U.’s name on it. Last month, he announced a similar project for Shanghai, to open in 2013. Mr. Sexton says that the original founders of N.Y.U. saw it as a university “in and of” the city. Now, he believes, it is time for the university to become “in and of the world.”

The financing of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi is noteworthy. The college is being entirely paid for by Abu Dhabi.......Some efforts to expand in this region have ended badly. Michigan State, which opened a branch campus in Dubai in 2008, announced last July that it would be canceling all its undergraduate programs. Meanwhile, George Mason, one of the first American universities to open in the United Arab Emirates, closed its Ras al-Khaimah campus in May without having graduated a single student. Both institutions had trouble attracting strong students and lost financial backing during the economic downturn.